Drogheda Ireland

As I mentioned in my previous post, a lot has happened since I moved to Ireland one year ago. And through my adjustment to this country and its culture, there have been a number of people who’ve helped along the way. One of the most noteworthy is a lovely group of foodies who now have a name (Irish Foodies) and an official website: The Irish Foodblogger Association.

It was in May of last year that we gathered together for the first time, though back then we were all coming as individual food bloggers and not as a group. Bord Bia and Donal Skehan organized the first-ever meeting of food bloggers in Ireland, and though I had emailed with a few in the months leading up to the meet I had never actually come face-to-face with anyone but the Daily Spud (both being big sushi fans, we’d met up earlier for a Yamamori dinner). The first new face I would see was Kristin of dinnerdujour, who offered me a lift after she heard I lived nearby. Together we trekked up the M1 to Dublin to meet up with our foodie peers.

The other day I came across a notebook that I brought from Los Angeles but hadn’t looked at in ages. It was a journal of notes that started in 2008 and ended before I moved to Ireland, which was on March 4, 2010. The last few pages are my frantic “to do” lists for my move, which included such chores as burn 10 CDs a day every day to iTunes, go to packing supply store, and don’t forget yourPASSPORT!!!

What’s more interesting was a list of goals I’d set for myself back in 2008. They ranged from things I wanted to accomplish that day, like transcribe Tahiti interviews (for a story I was writing for a food/travel magazine) to tasks I wanted to finish within a month like clean up patio and buy plants for it. But further down the list were some life goals:

There is a man in Drogheda whose reputation became known to me the day after I moved to Ireland. I was sitting in the immigration office of the local garda station waiting for my Irish ID card and chatting with Dennis, the head officer there. As soon as he heard I was a food and travel journalist, he insisted I try La Pizzeria, an Italian restaurant that had been in Drogheda for over 20 years and was still going strong. But his recommendation came with a caveat: “Don’t be late and don’t do anything to make Jian Carlo mad.”

Over the next few months I got more referrals to La Pizzeria from taxi drivers, shopkeepers and my new Irish friends. And every single one of them included their own version of Dennis’ warning. From what I could gather, this Jian Carlo guy was basically Drogheda’s version of Seinfeld’s “Soup Nazi” character, who infamously dismissed fickle or slow-moving customers with a thunderous “NEXT!” before demanding they leave the premises. But customers always came back because they couldn’t live without his delectable soupy creations. To be honest, it didn’t exactly make me want to run over to La Pizzeria, despite the fact that basically everyone in town raved about the food there.

My sister and me in our bedroom in Kamakura, Japan (I can’t tell who’s who in this pic!)

Even though I live thousands of miles away from her, I still forget that most of my friends here in Ireland have never met my sister. For the last several years, we lived fairly close to one another in Los Angeles and shared a good number of friends, so it’s a strange thing that many of my new friends here have little clue about my other half.

I say “other half” because we’re identical twins, a detail that I often forget to mention and which always elicits expressions of shock and awe. I usually refer to her as my sister in conversation as it never occurs to me to specify twin sister. I think for a lot of people it’s hard to grasp that there is another person who looks just like me and who walks and talks a lot like me out there in the world somewhere. It’s essentially telling people that I have a clone, a true, genetic clone. Of course since I’m used to being a twin, I don’t think it’s that big a deal.

I recently celebrated my [age not important] birthday here. I spent the first five years of life in Japan, a few in Arkansas and several birthdays in both Los Angeles and San Francisco. This was the first in Ireland, a landmark occasion of sorts. There are days when I still pinch myself…and a few days where I want to punch myself.

I kid, I kid! Even with all the political turmoil and recession depression, I love it here. But I still find myself mired in figuring out the little things. While in some ways I’m quite settled, there are new discoveries almost every day. I’m still trying to distinguish between regional accents that everyone else seems to recognize and I’m struggling to wrap my brain around the culture of Irish Travellers. Whether it’s a type of bread I’ve never heard of (Mountaineering Man recently introduced me to barmbrack – yum!) or political parties (it’s Gaelic but I find it amusing that the main party has the word fail (Fáil) in its name, so appropriate!) it’s trying to understand all the details of daily Irish life that consumes my time.

Today I went into a big-box sports shop in town looking for a pair of running shoes. I saw a few pair I liked and stood near them, waiting patiently for one of the two sales clerks who loitered nearby to assist me. After a few minutes of being stared at, I did a little hand up gesture, the polite and non-verbal “oi” to let them know I needed help. No reaction. One of them, a young woman, walked over to me (or so I thought) but then passed and started arranging shoes on the very shelf I was standing next to. “Excuse me,” I said. She turned, pretended not to hear me (there was just no way she didn’t unless she was legally deaf) and walked away. She then strolled over to a boy, no more than 10-years-old who stood about 5 feet away from me and asked him, “You doin’ all right there?” She then turned again and started to walk toward me, and again I said, “Hi, excuse me…” but my words hung in the air like one of those cartoon bubbles of text as she passed me by, again ignoring me.

I’ve touched briefly on customer service (or the lack, thereof) in Ireland before, but I think it’s time for a full-blown rant. To be frank: I’m fed up. Even after over 10 months of living in Ireland, I’m still taken aback by the blatant disregard for customers around here. For a country in the depths of a dismal recession, I’m surprised that businesses are still ignoring the need for better customer service. The big-box stores are especially guilty of this. Almost every time I’m in the check-out line at Dunnes, I’m standing there, waiting while two register clerks exchange weekend gossip, completely ignoring the fact that there are numerous customers waiting to get on with their lives. Thankfully Tesco offers a self-checkout line, which I always use as I am over the slow and often rude service there.

I used to be afraid to say the words, “I don’t know.” One of my biggest fears was admitting I didn’t know something, whether it was how to scuba dive or where St. Charles was located or how to properly light barbeque charcoals. For a long time I got away with a confident nod and a smile, which would deceive people into thinking I knew what I was talking about when in fact, I had no idea.

There was a particular period in my life where this whole charade became utterly exhausting and more trouble than it was worth. It was shortly after I graduated from college and I was living with roommates in a very hip part of San Francisco called Hayes Valley. Within a few months of living there I befriended a number of people in the neighborhood and became good friends with a couple of guys who lived down the street. Both exuded this almost tangible sense of cool; one had a very exotic and odd Finnish name, even though neither he nor his parents (or grandparents, for that matter) were from Finland. The other was tall and lanky and played guitar and spun records on his Technics 1200s in his spare time. Together they were the hipster poster boys for our stylish little ‘hood: all vintage threads, Swedish minimalism and wispy indifference. All the hipster girls in the neighborhood vied for their attention.

There are some things so precious you want to keep them all to yourself, safely tucked away from prying eyes and inevitable opinions and questions. There’s safety in keeping something secret; it’s a preservation method, a way to keep something protected and allow space for growth without influence or distraction.

But this is a blog about my life here in Ireland, and it would be unfair to readers and downright untruthful to hold back on something as significant as this any longer. While I did slip in a little mention a couple of posts back, I have yet to elaborate. So here goes [*takes deep breath*]: I’m in love with an Irish man.

Apologies for the lack of posts. I was away for nearly two weeks on Christmas holiday back to my hometown of Los Angeles and have been sick with a bad cold ever since returning. I promise a real post in the coming days but for now, enjoy some foodie pics from my LA trip!

*Sushi at Z’s: Straight from the airport to my sister’s for a shower and then right on to Z’s Sushi, my family’s favorite sushi spot in LA. Best salmon sushi I’ve ever had (the secret is the little slice of clear seaweed that tops each piece of salmon).

*Dinner at my sister’s: My dad and sister worked together to make these delicious oxtail ravioli, which was served in a very simple sauce and topped with good parmesan. NOM!

Dealing with any government agency or office in the United States, at least in my experience, is an absolute nightmare. If you’re calling on the telephone, forget the naïve notion that you’ll actually get a human being on the other end; the truth is you’ll end up going through a series of automated communications designed to never, ever connect you with anything other than a taunting, recorded message. It’s like the digital equivalent of a garden maze, except there is no exit.

And don’t even get me started on the DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles), where people go to slowly spiral into mental insanity from excruciating waiting periods and the miles of red tape it takes to do simple tasks like getting a driver’s license, renewing your vehicle registration or filing paperwork to sell your car. People who work at the DMV are a whole other species as well. Generally they are intentionally rude, pissed-off types who seem to take great pleasure in toying with their hapless victims customers.* If you have to accomplish anything at the DMV you need to block out the entire day because you’ll be there under those Vitamin D-draining fluorescent lights, listening to an automated voice calling out numbers (none of which will be yours) all…day..long.